Adaptation Online: Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and Other Digital Performances

(Hardback)

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Adaptation Online: Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and other Digital Performances explores how traditional notions of the processes and products of creative adaptation are evolving online. Using a performance lens and a shift in terminology from the metaphor of the cultural meme to the framing that adaptation affords, Lyndsay Michalik Gratch considers online adaptations in terms of creative process and human agency, rather than merely as products. This book offers a glossary of strategies for online adaptation that is useful not only for scholars in performance studies, but also for scholars of cinema, communications, and new media studies.

Reviews

This book makes a strong contribution to the breadth and health of performance studies, and should be noted for its relevance and explanatory power when it comes to emerging forms of performance, technology, participation, and democratization. It moves beyond the analysis of the digital, broadly understood, to look at specific forms of adaptation and citationality in memes and viral video. The sweding chapter in particular, but not exclusively, shows how the ludic and the analytic work in tandem in serious play that unites comrades in art and helps build engaged, critical communities of practitioners. -- Craig S. Gingrich-Philbrook, Southern Illinois University
Lyndsay Michalik-Gratchs study of the ubiquitous practices of adapting videos on the Internet extends adaptation theory into new terrain with deft, insightful, and entertaining analyses of such phenomena and aesthetic/cultural practices as YouTube and social media memes, practices of autotuning, songification, sweding and various forms of re-enactment and parody. She develops a typology of video adaptation, an original theorization that is both precise and supple enough to be of great use to scholars who analyze Internet and popular culture communication in her wake. -- Patricia A. Suchy, Louisiana State University
Lyndsay Michalik Gratch's Adaptation Online attempts something different than a mere aesthetics or typology of digital appropriation and intertextual remixing, or even a sustained inquiry into the legality of appropriation. The book's sometimes troubling examples raise questions about the ethics of online appropriation. Gratch's most extreme cases compel readers to think through how unauthorized borrowing, "outsider" banditry, parody, mimicry, and sometimes outright mockery (even when uttered in a playful remix "vernacular") do or do not constitute responsible acts within virtual communities--which embrace, as the book reminds us, "a potentially global audience." -- Paul Edwards, Northwestern University

Author Bio

Lyndsay Michalik Gratch is assistant professor of film at Georgia Gwinnett College and an interdisciplinary scholar-artist.